Investment Product Performance & Accounting Cost System

Cost Accounting is one of the most important processes a financial entity must undertake to evaluate product profitability. It’s usually a time consuming and arduous process due to large amounts of data involved – and no less so than for our client, one of the largest investment management firms within one of Italy’s most important banking groups. Before we got involved, they were managing their cost accounting manually. Even with several productivity tools in place, individual users still had to spend unnecessary time and effort allocating every individual cost to its correct cost centre.

This process was taking an entire month to complete and by the time data was ready to be analysed it was already out of date. Understanding the true value of data was impossible, and also exposed the organization to operational risk.

Our client needed a well-structured and controlled system to simplify their business process, extract the real value of data, and ensure smart and timely business decisions.

That’s where we came in

The Solution – Irion

With Irion, it is possible to implement a high performance cost accounting system that allows top management to attain improved resource productivity, make sound business decisions and gain increased competitive advantage.

The solution developed on Irion gave our client an automatic cost accounting system to supports asset management in efficiently allocating costs over different product and distribution channels. This flexible solution acquires data from multiple sources, so users can insert and make adjustments to data, create their own customized business rules, and perform multi-level automatic processes to view C/E from multiple business perspectives.

The Irion framework was the best choice for the client, since it was specifically tailored to their needs and promised to bring immediate and consistent results.

 

Cost allocation has been dramatically simplified. The client simply defines generic business rules that match up each business cost to their related product or product line to then be allocated to the correct cost; the system automatically performs the entire cost allocation process, doing a month’s work in just 10 minutes.

Irion uses  faster cycles based on brief sessions of analysis, prototyping and design review. This approach guarantees a reduced time to solution; it allows energies to be focused on the client’s needs (definition of business logic, algorithms, process) without spending energies on unnecessary technical issues and infrastructure (system architecture, data model, UI and so on)

The Benefits

Thanks to the new cost accounting system, our client has been able to successfully automate and rationalise their process without having to worry about the correct process to use. Irion has completely automated their process, reducing the entire activity time from a month to just 10 minutes. The entire process is extensively documented (sources, business logic, algorithms…) so the client can refocus their resources from time-consuming, technical and manual activities, toward more productive data analysis.

Today management has a complete, useful and accurate view of their data, every month, to evaluate profitability and product risk. Specifically, each product and product family can be viewed according to its profitability, which is then aligned with the company strategy and financial performance. Today the solution is successfully operative and guarantees a complete methodology that is secure and reliable.

The entire cost allocation process has been simplified, improved and sped up for the client. Irion now allows the firm’s top management to make decisions more easily, since the true value of their balance sheet data is guaranteed. With the high performance and power of Irion our client can make sound business decisions, increase competitive advantage and improve resource productivity.